Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

His hands and arms, like Elsie’s, were scratched, but she could see nothing else amiss from where she stood.

Tentatively, she asked, “Daddy, what are we doing here?” She didn’t like the idea of interrupting, but her father sometimes spoke to God at such length that it wasn’t practical to wait until he was done.

“They never changed the door codes,” her father said,without turning from the plaster Jesus. “I didn’t want to bring you home just yet.”

“But how did we get here?” Elsie asked.

“Joel helped me. We got you released and brought you here so you could wake up in peace.” Joel, a doctor, had been one of her father’s parishioners and his best friend, before the Reverend’s fall from grace.

“But … Tshikapa, the Congo,” she said.

“Yes, Africa,” her father answered heavily. And then, as if to explain, he added, “Airlift and two hospitals.”

Yes. That. The mirage in her head was taking on solid form. The mob, and the rocks.

Elsie had been standing just inside the doorway, but now she got closer. Hoping the words were wrong, she asked, “Mama and Teddy are dead? I didn’t dream it?”

One of her father’s hands went to his face, and when it came away, Elsie could see that it was wet. He was crying. He turned his head slightly as he said, “You didn’t dream it, baby girl.”

She wanted to feel shocked, but she didn’t. Part of her had known the moment she woke up.

Elsie took a seat on an aged footstool with the stuffing coming out of it. A broken hymnal tablet shared the stool with her. When her leg brushed against it, a four-inch-high three-dimensional Japanese woman sprang up from the tablet’s screen, lifted her arms, and began to sing the Japanese version of “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” A crack down the center of the tablet caused half of the woman’s body to be a smudged rainbow of disconnected colors. Elsie switched off the tablet.

“Are they gone?” her father went on. “In a sense, yes. My beautiful wife and beautiful little boy, but—”

“But they’ll live on in heaven at the end of time?” Elsie interjected automatically, because that was the sort of thing her father would say at a moment like this one.

“Yes, they will. But they don’t have to wait, because they are living on already.”

A rock to the back of her mother’s head. Teddy trampled. She had seen those things.

“How?” she whispered.

The Reverend had his forehead leaned against his Bible in an attitude of most fierce prayer, and Elsie wondered if it was possible that he had conjured up a miracle. She imagined a mural of this very moment, herself and her father and God hovering above them in his radiant robes, and she saw the speech bubble above her own head: “Excuse me, Lord God? Have You got something remarkable up those flowing sleeves of Yours?” But the God in the imagined mural looked as curious as Elsie was to hear what her father was going to say.

“If there’s one thing I’ve always said,” the Reverend told his daughter, “it’s that a man who cannot admit he’s wrong is not much of a man.”

It was true, she’d heard him say that, but—

“Do you mean you, Daddy?” she asked.

“I do.”

This surprising admission took several seconds to unfold within Elsie. Her father was criticizing himself?

“What—what were you wrong about, Daddy?” she asked.

In the mural, God gave Elsie a look of disappointment. “You know what he was wrong about, Elsie,” His speech bubble admonished her.

Elsie’s speech bubble said, “I need to hear him say it.”

The Reverend Tadd said, “A revelation, my sweet girl, is like turning on a light or opening a window. Have I told you that?” Elsie still couldn’t see his expression, but she imagined that it looked as it often did during the most ecstatic portions of his sermons—one part joy, one part pain. “You’re in a dark room and then—poof!—the sun floods in. And what you thought were formless shapes and terrible shadows are not. In God’s light, you understand that they’re something else entirely.

“Do you want to know what I’ve been shown?” her father asked. “Should I try to put it into words, even though words won’t do it justice?”

“Sure, Daddy.” If there was one thing Elsie understood about her father, it was that he knew how to use words that would do his ideas justice. His pride in his verbal skill burned intensely. In the mural in Elsie’s mind, she saw that pride like a glowing coal where his heart should be. Her father’s skill with words was the only thing that had buoyed him in the face of his lost ministry, his failure with the church board, his public humiliation. And his skill with words was part of that tight grip the giant had around Elsie’s chest.

“I’ve been shown that my expulsion from the Church of the New Pentecost was fair. I was as wrong as a man could be,” he told her, the words coming out in a toneless stream. “I went on the radio all those years, I stood at the pulpit before my congregation and told them they were defying the Lord. Changing themselves, growing new hearts and lungs and now even eyeballs!” His voice grew more resonant, as if he were in rehearsal for a public performance.

In the mural in her mind, God said, “He impresseth Me greatly with his beautiful voice! At least he’s got that going for him.”

She silently agreed with the Lord; she’d always loved her daddy’s voice. But would he say the things Elsie could feel caged up inside her own chest?

The Reverend continued, “But what if I am the one who defied the holy design? I can still see the look in that boy’s eyes, Elsie, years ago, when I told him he was turning himself into a demon!”

He stood up and reached for Elsie’s hand without turning toward her. Elsie got to her feet and slipped her hand into his. She thought they were going to pray together, but instead he led her out the door and back into the hall. The Reverend moved swiftly, pulling her along in his wake as he walked up the stairs, through the vestry, and out into the church itself. The lights were off, but late-afternoon sunlight came in through the stained-glass windows, turning dust motes into burning stars. He walked to the very edge of the dais, still holding Elsie’s hand, and there he faced the empty pews as if they held a Sunday’s worth of worshippers. He raised his arms toward heaven, and because Elsie’s hand was clasped in his, her arm was lifted too.